bimi
A new day brings us news of yet another mailbox provider supporting BIMI! This time it’s Onet Poczta (Onet Post), the email service of Onet.pl, the largest Polish web portal and online news platform. They now support BIMI, they require VMC, and they’ve got a help page here.The AuthIndicators Working Group (the group behind the BIMI specification) has updated their mailbox provider support graphic accordingly.As best I can tell, Onet Poctz email domains include: op.pl, onet.pl, vp.pl, poczta.onet.pl, autograf.pl, buziaczek.pl, onet.com.pl and amorki.pl[ H/T Natalia Zacholska and Matthew Vernhout ]
It’s been a while since I published a current state of BIMI support across the internet service provider (ISP) and mailbox provider (MBP) community, so here you go: this is the current status of BIMI across the email ecosystem, accurate as of April 2023.What is BIMI? Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is an email spec that allows email senders to display a brand or company logo alongside email messages when displayed in different email applications and webmail platforms. It helps to promote trust and security by requiring proper underpinnings of email authentication and a Yahoo study indicated that the logo display can increase chances that recipients will interact with your email messages. The BIMI specification is overseen by a collaborative email industry group known as the AuthIndicators Working Group, comprised of email senders, email receivers, email security and deliverability experts.Which mailbox providers and webmail platforms will display BIMI logos?Supports
Estonian webhost and mailbox provider Zone now supports BIMI and will display a sender logo in Zone Webmail, if they’re able to. VMC is required. Find more details here.Doing a quick check of my domain data, I think that Zone’s primary email domains are:webmail.zone.eezone.com.eezone.eezone.euzone.fizone.ltzone.lvThey also host email for more than a thousand other domains for customers; all relevant domains have an MX record pointing to zonemx.eu.
Normally now would be a good time for me to provide a write up on the current status of mailbox provider support for BIMI, but my Kickbox colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz beat me to it, so I’ll just link to her very informative blog post over on the Kickbox blog, where she details which mailbox providers support BIMI today, and which ones require a VMC or not.And don’t forget to check the BIMI section here on Spam Resource to find even more info on BIMI sender logos.BIMI is becoming kind of a big deal!
Check it out — it’s our first taste of BIMI on iOS outside of beta. Apple iOS users who upgrade to iOS 16 can now see a BIMI logo associated with an email send, depending on what mailbox provider they use. All four of these CNN Newsletter signup emails were opened and viewed on the default Apple mail client in iOS 16.0.2, and as you can see, iCloud and Fastmail users get shown the BIMI logo for CNN! You’ll note that no logo is displayed for the Yahoo and Gmail subscribers, even though both platforms support BIMI (and CNN has the Gmail-required VMC in place). Why Fastmail and not Gmail or Yahoo? I suspect that Fastmail was quickest to implement an updated “authentication results” header that includes information about the BIMI logo checks, and I don’t think Gmail and Yahoo are including that information. Yet? It seems likely that they’ll catch
We knew that BIMI support was coming to Apple iOS and MacOS. And now, Apple has published a support page: Prepare your email server for BIMI support in Apple Mail. Reading through the guide, it sounds like support might go beyond just Apple iCloud (mac.com, me.com, icloud.com) domains, if other mailbox providers structure their headers properly. If this support is client-based and not recipient domain based, that could really make things interesting. Here’s hoping I’m reading that right.For more on Apple’s rollout of BIMI support, check out this update from the Authindicators (BIMI) Working Group.
Back in June, Jennifer Nespola Lantz and I hosted a Kickbox Live session where we explained what a BIMI logo is, which ISPs support it, and we gave our recommendations on moving forward with a BIMI sender logo. And we even took time to answer a bunch of questions. And the info we shared then is still the latest and greatest with regard to BIMI status, so if you’re curious as to what this whole BIMI logo thing is and what you should be doing about it, feel free to head on over to the Kickbox blog and check it out.And don’t forget, I’ve got a whole BIMI section here on Spam Resource, including current and upcoming (Apple) mailbox provider support, what to do if you’re seeing the wrong logo, how to “fake it ’til you make it” at Gmail, learn how to create an animated logo, and more!
So, you’ve published your DMARC logo record. Your shiny new SVG logo file looks great in testing, but no matter what you do, no logo shows up at Yahoo Mail. Or, even worse, a DIFFERENT, possibly old, logo shows up at Yahoo Mail. Don’t fret. This is all fixable! Read on to find out what to do.Keep in mind that once upon a time (prior to BIMI), Yahoo would try to populate sender logos automatically for Yahoo Mail. There are multiple ways they’d look up a logo to be mapped to a given email address or domain name, and even used to pull logos from Google Plus accounts (I do believe), back when that was a thing. But nowadays, the BIMI specification is the law of the land when it comes to displaying a sender logo in Yahoo Mail.If you’ve set up BIMI and it doesn’t seem to be showing
This is all subject to change, of course. Currently, we’re only as far as the first version of the iOS 16 Public Beta, and much could be different by the time we get to the actual final (non-beta) release version of iOS, which is said to launch late in 2022. But already, BIMI logo support is indeed in there, as you can see from screenshots of this email from Zillow, as viewed on my trusty iPhone SE (2020). Never have I been so happy so see a squiggly Z before today.In my testing, I found that the logo shows only for mail sent to iCloud accounts; I tested this with Gmail as well (both in the iOS Mail application) and logos didn’t work for any non-Apple domain recipients. Will that change? I hope so; it’d be nice if this were recipient-domain agnostic, like how Apple MPP is. Also, logos don’t show
What’s an ANIBIMI? A completely fake term that I just made up! It’s not a BIMI — it’s an animated user image for a Google profile, and (at least until Google decides they don’t like this any more) it’s your way to make an animated BIMI-like logo that will display for Gmail subscribers (only).Repeat after me: This is not actually a BIMI logo! You should still implement a BIMI logo! Especially since Apple’s jumping on the BIMI bandwagon. But since a lot of people have asked about animated profile images lately, I thought I would share this fun little trick. (And keep in mind that you can set this up and use it as a potential stopgap until you get that VMC certificate and are able to fully implement BIMI.)Create an animated GIF. There are lots of tools online that’ll help you with this, like EZGif, Imgflip or Canva. Because I’m